WRITE Daughter of Fortune ending. Nope. I received my developmental edit of Light & Shadow back from Tamara Shoemaker and got overly excited about doing rewrites for that, so Light & Shadow became my ToB&L focus for the month.

WRITE something else-I read over a WIP tentatively called Midnight Oil and realized Book One in the series was more or less a complete draft, and I have been slowly picking through it trying to address some of the more glaring issues in the story.

CONTINUE to Promote Mage & Source pre-order. CHECK. I did several interviews this month, which I think should count as promotion. I just don’t like promotion.

AUGUST GOALS:

FINISH LIGHT AND SHADOW REVISION- This is sure to occupy most of my writing time.

FINISH MIDNIGHT OIL REVIEW/REVISION- I have about 25% of the book remaining, so this is do-able.

ATTEND WRITER’S DIGEST CONFERENCE AND PITCH THE EIGHTH OCTAVE!! I head to NYC on Aug 16 to attend the conference, meet Tamara my co-writer, and pitch our book!

VARIOUS EDITING AND FORMATTING PROJECTS. I’m reading Tamara’s latest project right now, working on a close edit of a biography, and formatting a non-fiction psychology text for a small press.

My real book covers feature portraits of my narrators, but for a different concept, I decided to show the magical aspect of the books and the ongoing saga of the Ophirae stones, the connecting plot arc of the entire series of Tales of Blood & Light.

On the cover of The Gantean, you see the mysterious red Ophira stone that Leila brought with her from Gante in her “barbarian” necklace:

On the cover for The Cedna, you see the Opal Ophira, which the Cedna awakens during her tragic love affair with Onatos Amar:

These two books were originally conceived as a duet within the series, and I like to think these new covers reflect that, with aspects of the images reflecting each other, the watery center of The Cedna‘s stone matching the watery background of The Gantean.

Mark asked me some fun questions about Mage and Source and other various topics over on his blog. Read the full interview here: https://makingfiction.com/2017/07/23/mage-and-source/. Yu’ll get to see a few images ideas for Gante, as well as my soundtrack pics for the book’s opening scene.

In fact, I was so excited about FAN ART FRIDAY that I completely forgot that my book release is today, too. Yep, today is Mage and Source‘s book day! So before I get into the fun of fan art, have a look at Mage and Source over at Amazon, and order your ebook or print version today!

This week I have two polar opposites as my fan art exemplars, and it’s the fact that they’re entirely different from one another that brought me to present them together. One is a stark black-and-white graphic style, the other is sparkly, colorful, and cinemaplex-bright.

For your viewing pleasure, this week I have covers for Metropolitan Dreams, a New Weird novel by Mark A. King, and for Hex Breaker, a YA-fantasy by Taryn Noelle Kloeden.

How did I end up with two such opposite projects? Well, one of my goals in making my fan art is to represent the book as I see it–and as differently as I can from the real cover. Mark’s original cover by Tamara Rogers was a lush, cinematic extravaganza of color and delight. So I decided to make him a stark black-and-white cover image that still captured one of the elements I loved about his book: the play of dualities and polarities in his themes and images. Here’s what I came up with:

Mark’s book is set in London, and so I made this silhouette image of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which has a cameo in the book, and then reflected it to suggest at those dualities that are so central in his story (light/dark, above/below, past/future). The central “railroad” that separates the text also has something to do with the story, but you’ll have to go read the book to find out what!

Up next, Taryn’s real Hex Breaker cover is a restrained, grown-up, greyscale illustration, so I decided to make her a bright, colorful, teenage-movie-poster-style cover mishmash similar to Tamara Shoemaker’s original covers for her YA Fantasy series. I also wanted to experiment with text effects, namely beveling and embossing.

Here’s my Hex Breaker fan art:

I ended up only keeping a very light bevel on the text. Some of you with sharp eyes may see that I re-used the nebula image from some of last week’s fan art here, too.

So, two covers, two completely different directions. Which style do you like best? Graphic black-and-white or bold bright color?

I drew a map of Galantia, the High City, to include in Mage and Source. I think it will go well with the two other maps, one of Lethemia and one of the East, drawn by my friend Jermey Jensen (see his maps below, labeled “Lethemia” and “The East”).

All the maps are hand-drawn.

I also drew a map of Solmari (last map), another fantasy world that I co-wrote with Tamara Shoemaker (that book is called The Eighth Octave). Tamara and I are currently tweet pitching The Eighth Octave in various forums over on Twitter.